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BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

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Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

#71

Post by anon9001 »

rayiner wrote: post #28

Oh man! I first tried BeOS personal edition when it came on a CD with Maximum PC magazine. (Referring to same demo CD, though the poster is not me: https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=1067159&s... . Also, how crazy is it that Ars Technica’s forums have two decade old posts? In 2000, that would be like seeing forum posts from 1980.) I remember being so happy when we got SDSL, and I could get online from…

> In 2000, that would be like seeing forum posts from 1980.

That's the premise of Jason Scott's project launched in 1998 :) http://textfiles.com/

Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

#72

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

deepaksurti wrote: post #67
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #63

That was actually a fairly awesome OS (for its day). Many folks thought Apple would buy it. When they purchased NeXT, instead, a lot of us were disappointed. However, all these years later, I'm very glad that BeOS wasn't selected.

I have never used BeOS, can you explain why you are glad now that it wasn't selected?

Mostly because of the UNIX subsystem. Having all that horsepower under the hood has been awesome.

Also, NeXTStep became Cocoa, which knocked PowerPlant into a cocked hat. That may not be as compelling an argument. I heard that the BeOS framework was damn nice (never tried it, myself).

Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

#73

Post by qubex »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #47
mumblemumble wrote: post #35

Ah, memories. Used to use BeOS as my primary OS for a year or two. I think it's the only OS I ever found to be truly intuitive and pleasant to work with. That said, I don't think the world would be in a better place had Apple chosen Be over NeXT. The elephant in the room is security: NeXTSTEP, being Unix-based, has some amount of security baked in from the ground up. BeOS didn't; it was more akin to Windows 95 or cla…

Security from what? Do user accounts really provide much benefit in the personal computing space? Where the median user count is 1? Neither OS had the kind of security that is really useful today for this usecase, which is per-application.

“Security” is a bit of a misnomer in this context: I think what you actually meant was “multi-user architecture” which, as remarked elsewhere, undergirds the whole notion of keeping processes from promiscuously sharing any and all resources.

Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

#74

Post by msla »

philwelch wrote: post #31
djsumdog wrote: post #10

When I started University in 2000, I had a quad-boot system: Win98, Win2000, BeOS 5 and Slackware Linux (using the BeOS bootload as my primary because it had the prettiest colors). I mostly used Slackware and Win98 (for games), but BeOS was really neat. It had support for the old Booktree video capture cards, could capture video without dropping frames like VirtualDub often did, and it even had support for disabling…

There also used to be other CPU architectures--though even at the time, enough people complained about "Wintel" that maybe it was obvious that the alternatives weren't ever going to catch on.

People complained about "Wintel" because the 32-bit x86 chips were so fast and cheap they destroyed the market for RISC designs and killed existing RISC workstation and server architectures, like SPARC and HPPA and MIPS.

By the time the Pentium came around, the future looked like a completely monotonous stretch of Windows NT on x86 for ever and ever, amen. No serious hardware competition, other than Intel being smart enough to not kill AMD outright for fear of antitrust litigation, and no software competition on the desktop, with OSS OSes being barely usable then (due to an infinite backlog of shitty hardware like Winmodems and consumer-grade printers) and Apple in a permanent funk.

We were perpetually a bit afraid that Microsoft/Intel would pull something like Palladium/Trustworthy Computing [1] and lock down PC hardware but good, finally killing the Rebel Alliance of Linux/BSD, but somehow the hammer never quite fell. It did in the cell phone world, though, albeit in an inconsistent fashion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next-Generation_Secure_Computi...

Microsoft and Intel really seemed permanent back then. I wonder if that's how people felt about IBM back in the 1950s.

Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

#75

Post by pjmlp »

beefhash wrote: post #25
pjmlp wrote: post #20

In this alternative universe, Objective-C would have died, Swift would never happened, and C++ would rule across desktop and mobile OSes (thinking only of Windows, BeOS X, Symbian, Windows CE and what might have been BeOS based iOS). Also POSIX would be even less relevant, and very few would be buying BeOS X for doing Linux coding.

> Also POSIX would be even less relevant, and very few would be buying BeOS X for doing Linux coding. I don't think I'd enjoy a GNU userland/glibc/Linux monoculture, quite honestly. I'm glad POSIX exists to have a slightly less moving target.

That was exactly part of my point, with BeOS that wouldn't have happened anyway.

The only successful UNIX desktop is OS X.

Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

#76

Post by andrewflnr »

mumblemumble wrote: post #35

Ah, memories. Used to use BeOS as my primary OS for a year or two. I think it's the only OS I ever found to be truly intuitive and pleasant to work with. That said, I don't think the world would be in a better place had Apple chosen Be over NeXT. The elephant in the room is security: NeXTSTEP, being Unix-based, has some amount of security baked in from the ground up. BeOS didn't; it was more akin to Windows 95 or cla…

Funny you should mention Windows 95. The company that sold that ended up doing pretty well.

Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

#77

Post by pjmlp »

dfox wrote: post #37
pjmlp wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What lack of imagination, as if they wouldn't be upgrading their toolchains. In fact, Haiku does support more modern toolchains and the BeOS R5 is only kept around due to ABI issues with binary only BeOS software.

The ABI issues are exactly the reason why having C++ as OS API level language is a bad idea.

Not all, Android, IBM i (C++ has been slowly replacing PL/S), mbed, Windows, and OS X (IO Kit, now Driver Kit), are doing pretty alright.

There is no such thing as C ABI, it only happens to work on OS that are, surprise surprise, written in C.

Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

#78

Post by Octoth0rpe »

anthk wrote: post #55
bitL wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think BeOS was the only OS that allowed smooth playback of videos and work at the same time, something Windows was capable 5 and Linux 10 years later :D

Linux could do that in 2001 just fine, and without crashing like Windows. XV was amazing. So was MPlayer.

> without crashing like Windows

That depended _very_ heavily on your graphics card at the time. In 2001, I could get X to crash on my work computer if I shook my mouse too fast. At home on my matrox card, yes, it was rock stable.

Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

#79

Post by hugi »

andrewflnr wrote: post #76
mumblemumble wrote: post #35

Ah, memories. Used to use BeOS as my primary OS for a year or two. I think it's the only OS I ever found to be truly intuitive and pleasant to work with. That said, I don't think the world would be in a better place had Apple chosen Be over NeXT. The elephant in the room is security: NeXTSTEP, being Unix-based, has some amount of security baked in from the ground up. BeOS didn't; it was more akin to Windows 95 or cla…

Funny you should mention Windows 95. The company that sold that ended up doing pretty well.

Really? Most people I talk with these days seem to agree that the proprietary OS is a liability.

Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

#80

Post by colejohnson66 »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #47
mumblemumble wrote: post #35

Ah, memories. Used to use BeOS as my primary OS for a year or two. I think it's the only OS I ever found to be truly intuitive and pleasant to work with. That said, I don't think the world would be in a better place had Apple chosen Be over NeXT. The elephant in the room is security: NeXTSTEP, being Unix-based, has some amount of security baked in from the ground up. BeOS didn't; it was more akin to Windows 95 or cla…

Security from what? Do user accounts really provide much benefit in the personal computing space? Where the median user count is 1? Neither OS had the kind of security that is really useful today for this usecase, which is per-application.

I do like that you have to “sudo” a program to allow it to access certain files. Even if I am the only user, it stops malicious programs from modifying certain files without me noticing.
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